The Kenyan author, who died in 2019, ruthlessly took down the clichés of writing about the continent. His work is as relevant as ever.

Not long ago, I saw an article that would have both delighted and exasperated the late Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina. “Entrepreneurs are planning autonomous ‘charter cities’ as an answer to Africa’s population growth,” a passage read. The article, in the Financial Times, described the efforts of investment bankers and wealthy libertarians, including a grandson of Milton Friedman, to solve one of the continent’s most pressing problems—at least, according to people who don’t live in Africa. The solution proposed in the piece was the creation of semi-independent urban utopias with “low taxes and good internet”: dream cities, ideally situated on a picturesque island (one was envisioned for Zanzibar), that would be a haven from bad governance and laws that are unwelcoming to enterprising foreigners and offshore banking. The cities would beckon all the coders, startup founders, and digital nomads already on a waiting list for one such destination being built outside Lagos, Nigeria.

The Financial Times story had all the elements Wainaina loved to mock: the hand-wringing about the perpetual explosion in Africa’s population, and the fear inside that hand-wringing; the reverence for grand, shifty ideas from white men; and the emperor-has-no-clothes solutions. In his memoir, “One Day I Will Write About This Place,” he describes how, when he was a boy, some Swedes installed a machine in his home town of Nakuru, Kenya, that would supposedly convert cow shit into fuel for powering electric-light bulbs and cooking food. “This way, they said kindly, eyes as blue as Jesus’s, looking at us through steel glasses, you can avoid malnutrition,” Wainaina writes. “This is called development, they said, and we are here to raise your awareness.” Somehow it never caught on.

Wainaina, who died in 2019, at the age of forty-eight, following a stroke, was most well known in the West for his viral 2005 essay “How to Write About Africa,” which was published on the Web site of the literary magazine Granta, and is still its most shared piece online. In it, he ruthlessly and amusingly took down the clichés of lazy writing and foreign correspondence about the continent (AK-47s, starving children, corrupt Big Men, big skies). Wainaina was fed up with the pathetic tropes that had been repeated so often that they had come to seem like facts—about helpless but corrupt natives, and crusading aid workers, celebrity activists, and conservationists—and with the lack of intelligent historicization of Africa’s political problems. “Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone,” he writes, of the typical attempt to write about the continent. “Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her.” But his writing roved among genres, subjects, and moods—from recipes and food writing to fiction, memoir, and reportage—often all mixed together in a single piece. A collection of much of that writing, also called “How to Write About Africa,” was released last year, edited by his friend the Indian writer Achal Prabhala. Almost twenty years after the publication of Wainaina’s essay, the landscape of writing about the continent continues to expand, but his essential points about the exploitative nature of foreign interest in Africa, and the daily contradictions of life there, persist.

“How to Write About Africa,” the essay, was written during a wave of American humanitarian aid rushing into East Africa, with Kenya often being a first stop. The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, began flooding the country with billions of dollars in 2003. PEPFAR was a pet project of George W. Bush, and it funded Christian-aligned non-governmental organizations that brought in well-paid foreign staff and a proselytizing bent, focussed on abstinence and religious faith. Wainaina’s satire of N.G.O. culture was among his sharpest; Nairobi had become two cities, he observed, one of local residents and another of international salaries, the latter causing inflation and further inequality in the former.

Those contrasts still exist, but since cuts were made to the program, starting in 2019—and the continent’s general move away from foreign aid and toward extractive resources for cash deals with countries like China and the United Arab Emirates—a new cast of characters has arrived to join the white-hero celebrity activists and conservationists, along with World Bank employees, whom Wainaina has skewered in the past. There are tens of thousands of Chinese workers and scores of tech-startup founders and entrepreneurs arriving daily in Kenya, trying to make it rich on dubious products and services. Both groups have disrupted the economy that was once defined by foreign aid.

The cultural landscape has shifted as well; Wainaina movingly came out in 2014, after Nigeria’s President at the time, Goodluck Jonathan, signed an anti-gay bill into law. “It will take me five years after my mother’s death to find a man who will give me a massage and some brief, paid-for love. In Earl’s Court, London. And I will be freed, and tell my best friend, who will surprise me by understanding, without understanding. I will tell him what I did, but not tell him I am gay,” he writes in the essay that he published when he came out, “I Am a Homesexual, Mum.” Despite anti-gay legislation in Uganda, Ghana, and other countries, queer life in cities like Lagos and Kampala has opened up and expanded in the past decade; recently, in Nairobi, I noticed how free gay friends feel being out at night in public, from bars in the central business district to clubs in areas more frequented by foreigners. But Wainaina’s work dissecting the delusions of Westerners who project their hopes and fears onto the continent is as relevant as ever—perhaps even more so, now that the goal is no longer to rescue but to profit.

Wainaina began his career publishing short stories—for little to no money—on mostly obscure Web sites and in the literary magazine Chimurenga. In 2002, he won the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing. After that, he founded Kwani?, a magazine of new writing from Kenya; wrote for Kenyan, South African, and Western magazines and journals (many of the essays and short stories in “How to Write About Africa” appeared in these publications); authored a play, which was staged in Toronto, and an unpublished novel; gave talks; and taught at workshops and universities around the world. In 2011, he released “One Day I Will Write About This Place.” Born to a Kikuyu father and a Rwandan Ugandan mother in Kenya’s Rift Valley, Wainaina navigated the terrain of having “parents, still with one foot in their home villages, still with colonial hangovers, busy building the nation,” as he wrote of characters in one of his short stories. He was also part of the “first generation of kids in independent Kenya, the first to be born in a city. There were no books about them, films about them. They didn’t even see themselves on television.”

In 1991, when he was twenty, Wainaina made his way to South Africa to study accounting at the now closed University of Transkei, not long before the fall of apartheid. In his memoir, he describes his childhood as relatively happy, but, away from home, he began to suffer from depression and was unable to finish his studies. He spent nine years in South Africa. The experience of being a Black foreigner in a country governed by its racial gradients darkened his view of Kenya. The country, he realized, was politically and economically deteriorating, as a series of corrupt leaders manipulated and stole from their constituents. It may have won its freedom from the British, but it was an unwilling amalgam of disparate ethnicities, languages, and histories. In his essays, Wainaina reflects on the “dual personalities” required of his fellow-Kenyans to navigate their post-independence reality. Of a man who had two separate families, he writes, “We hide whole lives in the gaps between these forked tongues. This is how Mash’s father managed to hide his village family for so long. He was somebody else, somewhere else, in another language.”

Wainaina travelled through rural Kenya, South Sudan, and Togo from the late nineties to the mid-aughts. His essays from that time describe the strange and necessary intimacies that develop among the inhabitants of nations in free fall. One night in eastern Kenya, he goes out drinking and dancing at a club with a colleague who had been quiet about his own life until that point. “Kariuki reveals himself,” Wainaina writes. “We hear how he prefers to work away from home because he can’t afford the school fees and hates seeing his children at home; how, though he has a diploma in Agriculture, he has been taking casual driving jobs for ten years.” You can imagine Kariuki spilling this all out to Wainaina in the parking lot of the club, the pair heady, a little delirious. Wainaina continues, “We hear about how worthless his coffee farm has become. He starts to laugh when he tells us how he lived with a woman for a year in Kibera, afraid to contact his family because he had no money to provide for them.”

Because Wainaina lived so much—he had jobs as a part-time agricultural-sector bureaucrat, a caterer, and a charity researcher, to name a few—and travelled so widely, his writing is as full of life as what he saw in his encounters. He describes a night spent in a friend’s childhood bedroom in Togo’s capital city, Lomé: “It is very neat. There is a fan, which does not work. There are faded posters of soccer players. There are two gimmicky-looking pens arranged in crisp symmetry on the table, both dead. There is a cassette player plugged in and ready to be switched on, but no cassettes. There is also no electricity; I am using a paraffin lamp. The bedroom is all aspiration.” Wainaina observes how people can cling to the safety of orderliness despite prevalent dysfunction. If everyone agrees to ignore the same things, and look in the same direction, the illusion of well-being can be reassuring, too.

In South Africa, Wainaina spent some time running a restaurant and a catering business. He didn’t have much success, but the experience allowed him to be more closely involved with a great love of his life: food. The writing collected in “How to Write About Africa” contains an unexpected number of recipes from the continent—prawn palaver, mango-and-peri-peri salad, Swahili braised chicken—along with a history of Swahili cuisine that traces it to a blend of East African, Indian, and Middle Eastern customs. Wainaina wanted to overcome the lack of published information about African food. He complained that there was no writing about the flavors, values, and delicacies of the continent’s many cuisines. Instead, there were reports on indigenous fares written by Western academics and travel articles by writers who got upset stomachs from street food. But Wainaina’s descriptions are seductive and appetizing. When he contrasts fruit stalls in Kenya with tidy Western supermarkets, he writes, “The produce is so fat, it bursts out of its skins. Plantain bananas; splotchy-skinned, sweet bananas; bananas that remain green when ripe; even red bananas. It is a nice democratic market. Every veggie has a right to be displayed.”

I met Wainaina a few times socially and at literary events, and had the sense that, while we enjoyed each other’s company, he wasn’t sure if he liked what I represented. I was a fellow-writer, and a fellow-African, albeit one born in the United States. But I was also a foreign correspondent, engaged in that morally fraught exercise of writing about African countries for mostly Western audiences; I was always the observer, never the subject of the outside gaze. Some foreigners do genuinely want to draw attention to political and human-rights abuses or provide aid to those in need, but there’s always a skewed power dynamic that gives us control over what is printed and who is helped. In the essay “The Power of Love,” Wainaina writes, “I have learned that I, we, are a dollar-a-day people (which is terrible, they say, because a cow in Japan is worth nine dollars a day). This means that a Japanese cow would be a middle-class Kenyan.” No one was better at conveying what it was like to be the unwilling and constantly analyzed subject of people who didn’t really know what the hell they were talking about but were good at pretending they did.

Wainaina’s fiction also attempts to show those feelings but does so with less success than his essays. Some stories, such as the funny, fantastical “Binguni!,” seem to lose narrative coherence on the journey from his brain to the page. Others are satiric vignettes—pointed takedowns of sham humanitarians, sham foreign journalists, sham white saviors and their sham schemes to save the continent—whose villains can read more like stock inventions than like surprising ones. But Wainaina’s observations remain sharp throughout. Of one character, he writes, “He wears a double-breasted waistcoat and his polyester tie matches his breast-pocket hankie. Yuppie: made in China.” And, of another character’s attempts to seduce a young white woman new to Kenya: “He will start paint-brushing the air again, this time drawing lions in bathtubs and leopards as pets. Eyes will open wide as she hears of dalliances with the Delameres, and lounging with Lord Erroll, hunting with Hemingway, getting bombed with Blixen.”

In his essay “On Kapuscinski’s ‘Gonzo Orientalism,’ ” Wainaina writes that “How to Write About Africa” was most inspired by his hatred of the work of Ryszard Kapuściński, the famed Polish chronicler of the dark continent, who blended reportage and fiction, without actually saying so, and whose writing has influenced generations of Western chroniclers of Africa after him. Wainaina never saw himself or any African he knew, wanting and messy and full, in the work of Kapuściński and writers like him, and the erasure was enraging. But to be told that certain works of literature defined your home, and not recognize the home in those works, was the best kind of motivation, too. Wainaina didn’t want boosterish stories about Africa that only highlighted the positive and ignored the rest. He was too rigorous for that, too intolerant of bullshit. He wanted stories that were as complex as the ones he dreamed up in his head, depressed on his mattress in his room in the Eastern Cape, unable to go to class. So Wainaina coped with the only thing he had at his disposal. He “chose to write,” he explains in the essay “When All Else Fails . . . Become a Writer,” “because it needed no visa—for years my checks would be paid out through friends, because it was something to do that cost no money, because I loved books, because it made me feel I was worth something.” He wanted to write himself into existence. Many of us can relate. ♦